


come on friends, get up now

by jumpfall



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-25
Updated: 2012-05-25
Packaged: 2017-11-06 00:42:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jumpfall/pseuds/jumpfall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It won't be easy and it won't be pretty, they don't say. You're going to hurt faster than you heal and lose more than you win. The Avengers have one thing in common. They all sign on. [Movie spoilers.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	come on friends, get up now

_Come with us_ , they say. _Learn to fight_.

 _It won't be easy and it won't be pretty_ , they don't say. _You're going to hurt faster than you heal and lose more than you win_.

The Avengers have one thing in common. They all sign on.

-

Natasha wields her emotions like they're weapons and her weapons like they're shields. A well-placed tear can be more effective than a knife in the right situation, but you never know when the other might come in handy, so she carries them both with her as tools in her arsenal. Before she joined SHIELD, she trusted five people; three of them betrayed her, one is dead, the last thinks she is. She regrets two of them. In the time since, she has trusted three. None of them have betrayed her, and they are all still alive. She regrets all of them.

Clint Barton holds a knife to her throat and she does not flinch, yet being in the same room as Bruce Banner scares her senseless. In her life as a spy, she has found herself helpless exactly twice, today included.

(In the first case, she is alive today because Clint had the kill shot cold, the orders in hand, and he still chose to lower his bow.)

It is not that she is afraid of dying, for that has been a distinct possibility since day one. Neither is it relying on someone else for her survival, as the partners she has run ops with can attest to. What discomfits her is not that she was saved, because she has done that in turn too, but that she is grateful as a result. She doesn't like feelings she can't control, can't handle feelings of trust that interfere with her ability to do her job properly.

(Later -- when Hawkeye is his own again, when she has patched his wounds and cleared his head and stripped the dead look from his eyes, she will say to him, "You have to level out." She'll watch how he does it because this is something she'll need to do herself, because Clint Barton is one of the three, because Loki has taken many things from her but that is not one of them.)

-

Bruce wakes up in Harlem, two inches of solid concrete below him and half a city block's worth of destruction above him. In the distance, sirens blare.

He wakes up in Warsaw. In Tehran. In Sydney and Montreal and Naples.

He closes his eyes at 25,000 feet and wakes up in Long Island. A pile of rubble that was once a building is below him and clear blue sky is above him, but when he opens his eyes what he sees is the fear in Agent Romanoff's eyes and the understanding in Tony Stark's face.

New York is alight with flames on the TV and Bruce is on a bike before the hour is up. He knows where he needs to be. Hulk agrees. Of the secrets Bruce keeps, this is the one he guards most closely: Bruce has always been able to feel the other guy. What he doesn't know is whether or not the other guy feels him. It's not something he particularly wants to.

(It is one thing to be on the wrong side of the glass; it is another entirely to say that Bruce has simply not tried hard enough.)

A dozen people in a dozen countries ask him if he interacts with the monster in the back of his head. He tells them all no. He lies because he needs to, lies because it's fun. He lies because he lost the truth somewhere around Nashville and hasn't bothered finding it since. This is just the lie he tells himself.

(When Tony Stark says, "I'm a big fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster," the other guy preens. The little voice in the back of Bruce's mind that he'd thought dead since he woke to the screams of children in Bangkok says, "finally, someone thinks so.")

-

Thor thinks Loki dead for four months, three weeks, and six days. Their father presides over the funeral, a solemn affair befitting the loss of a warrior, a brother, and a friend. Odin places a jewel-encrusted cloak in an empty grave, its cloth a green that burns like the fire in Loki's eyes when he let go. It is a burial worthy of a king.

On the day Heimdall calls them to his post, one eye fixed on the abyss as he draws the ancient tale of the tesseract from their world's history and details what has been happening on Earth, Odin will cry for Loki and send Thor back to Earth to retrieve his brother.

(When Thor battles Captain America and the Man of Iron for Loki, he will have known of his brother's continued existence for approximately twelve minutes.)

He is not bound to Loki by blood, but by the bonds of a brotherhood chosen instead. Though he loves him no less than he would had Odin fathered him, too, he cannot abide by the killing of the Son of Coul. Agent Phil had the weaponry to threaten Loki's plan and chose to negotiate first instead. Loki would think it foolish. Thor thinks it wise. It is a lesson he wishes he'd learned earlier, and to know it Agent Phil must have been very wise indeed. Thor will mourn him in the manner of a fellow warrior, as is the Son of Coul's due.

(There is a moment during the battle atop the towering buildings of the city when Thor fears his brother cannot be saved. It is not the moment when Loki stabs him, but the moment when Loki detonates the marksman's arrow he has caught and blows himself right out of the sky. Loki has no apparent regard for the life of another, but Thor did not realize he had no regard for his own.)

-

Steve is out of practice fighting things with the ability to fight back; his control is top-notch, but he knows his own strength and all it takes is forgetting to pull one punch. Old habits die hard though, and he falls into the rhythm of the fight just like old times. He hasn't missed going to war, but he has missed this. Sure, a Chitauran army that replenishes itself is bearing down on them from the sky and the whole of Manhattan is in danger, but he knows both who he's for and what to do about it. There's something to be said for purpose, something that has been solely lacking since they thawed him out and woke him up and told him of all he has missed.

("It'll be fun," Natasha says, and for a minute it is not Black Widow but Bucky Barnes backing him up.)

This isn't the city he grew up in, isn't the city he knows, and that makes it easy enough to detach. A battlefield of street grids maps itself out in his head when he concentrates, modifying the strategy on the fly when Bruce shows up and changes the game. They need streets cleared and buildings emptied, an eye up high and offensive action in the sky, that damn portal closed so they can roll trained personnel out to the wider population.

Iron Man lands his armour to close the circle. They trust him to give the orders and he trusts them to do their jobs; he launches Natasha into the sky and gets out of Hulk's way and rallies with Thor for just one more round.

(They are not the team he left behind, but they are his all the same. )

-

Clint sees Loki only once during the battle for the city. Small mercies. At the time, providing Natasha cover is the priority, as she is about one sharp turn away from direct free fall. The arrow doesn't land, but that's fine. The next one will, or the one that follows that one. He has all the time in the world to wait.

SHIELD agents aren't meant to take revenge, but the agent whose 'stand down' order he is still half waiting for died not two hours ago. On occasion, Coulson had assumed the mantle not of Clint's handler but of his conscience. When Clint found himself in too deep and too far gone and long past neutral, Phil would walk him through the battlefield with a careful eye and orders that were not to be questioned. Loki took that obedience and twisted it to his own ends. It makes Clint nauseous even now.

(What scares him more is that Loki took only what was already there, in some fashion.)

He fights till he bleeds, bleeds till he's numb. Hulk takes out Loki and Natasha closes the portal and Iron Man hurtles from the sky, his trajectory tracing an ungraceful arc through the sky. It scares him more than it should, because there's blood on his hands today that he didn't put there, and if anyone might understand that it is these five. He can't afford to lose them.

(He doesn't know how he can feel so strongly for a man he has yet to properly meet. He knows of Tony Stark and does not doubt that Tony Stark knows of him, but the first words they exchanged were about half an hour ago, regarding battle tactics.)

-

Tony grazes the unforgiving vacuum of empty space and finds it cold, the landscape dark and blindingly bright in turn. The environmental sensors in the suit were never calibrated for this situation, alarms flashing red on the heads-up display as Jarvis' coding gathers data to run simulations. He knows instinctually where the hardware failed and the software crashed; when he closes his eyes, he can see the exact line where the code breaks down.

(In the report, he will say he passed out when the electromagnetic pulse from the nuke fried the delicate circuitry in the suit. He will not tell them he would be a poor engineer indeed if he had not accounted for that in the design; that power flickered for a second or two longer post-detonation before the arc reactor went dark, for just long enough to see that the plan worked.)

He skims his hand through the corona of the portal between the worlds and it comes away tingling. He knows one thing with sudden, bleak certainty: he will die here.

(There is a second truth to the matter, something Tony does not know so much as hope: it will have been worth it.)

-

 _Come with us_ , they say. _Learn to fight._

 _It won't be easy and it won't be pretty_ , they don't say. _You're going to hurt faster than you heal and lose more than you win._

The Avengers have one thing in common. They all sign on.


End file.
